Nine months after Trump’s order, four Brotherhood chapters carry designations and not one has been contested in court

Executive Order 14362, signed on 24 November 2025, designated nobody. It directed State and Treasury to assess the Lebanese, Jordanian and Egyptian chapters and file a joint report; the Charity & Security Network noted on 27 November that “[d]espite the title, the Executive Order does not designate any person or group.” The designations came later and did not match the order. On 13 January State listed the Lebanese Brotherhood, al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah, as both a Foreign Terrorist Organization under INA §219 and an SDGT, along with its secretary general Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh as an SDGT, with Treasury acting concurrently against the Jordanian and Egyptian chapters. On 9 March State designated the Sudanese Islamic Movement and its armed wing, the al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade, as SDGTs, FTO status effective 16 March. Sudan was never named in the executive order.

The Egyptian Brotherhood told Middle East Eye on 14 January that it would “pursue all appropriate legal avenues to challenge this decision and to protect the rights of the organisation and its members,” calling the designation “detached from reality and unsupported by evidence.” No petition for review — the D.C. Circuit is the statutory venue for FTO challenges — surfaced in this week’s sweep, and the absence has held for seven months. The litigation that does exist runs the other way. CAIR won a preliminary injunction in the Northern District of Florida in early March against a DeSantis executive order branding it a terrorist organisation, and sued Florida officials again on 1 July, the day the enabling statute took effect, with the ACLU, the SPLC, Akeel & Valentine and Bondurant Mixson & Elmore as counsel. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton sued CAIR and the Brotherhood in April after Governor Greg Abbott’s declaration.

Assessment: The gap between the order and the outcome is the story. The White House named three chapters; the government designated four, and the one it added — Sudan — is the one with a documented armed wing. That is a programme being driven by what is provable rather than by what was announced, which is unusual and worth crediting. The Brotherhood’s non-filing admits two readings and the desk cannot choose between them: either the group calculated that a D.C. Circuit petition would force it to litigate its own structure, or a filing exists and nobody has reported it. Treat the January vow as rhetoric until a docket number appears. Meanwhile the constitutional test of designation is being run by CAIR against two governors, not by the Brotherhood against Washington.